The Office of Service Learning and Science Unit at Lingnan University partnered with the Discovery and Education Department at Ocean Park (an aquatic theme park in Hong Kong) to develop a service learning project. Beyond service learning's traditional goals (enhanced student learning, useful service for a community partner), we examined the…

Service learning may offer an innovative perspective in the competing global and national health interests among Philippine universities. The author sought to understand the enablers and barriers of implementing service learning in the context of a premier private Catholic Philippine allied health profession education. Using an in-depth…

Urban institutions are typically located in diverse and vibrant cities. This diversity has changed over the decades, thus requiring campuses to address the complexity that is seen as these new American cities evolve. In this article the city of Buffalo is discussed as a city that manifests a continuous change in population diversity with a…

Increasingly, suburban universities find themselves in communities facing challenges that inner cities have had to deal with for decades, including concentrated poverty, housing vacancy, and underperforming school districts. While the problems are similar, the institutional context is different. Compared to central cities, suburban municipal…

There was a time when universities located in cities set themselves apart from urban life, even, in some cases, building walls that isolated their campuses. As the Cold War and Space Race accelerated the demand for academic expertise, government funding for basic and applied research became a mainstay of higher education. With the end of the Cold…

The degree to which urban and metropolitan colleges and universities can have a positive impact on their respective communities is heavily influenced by the nature and extent of their connectedness to, and alignment with, civic need. Drawn from the experiences and outcomes of the College of Staten Island's Legacy Trilogy initiative, a…

To further live our mission, Marquette has launched many new initiatives over the past five years that strategically connect our university to our community. In this paper, we will highlight three of these initiatives. The first relates to connecting the anchor institutions in our neighborhood through an effort called Near West Side Partners. The…

Volumes of research studies, surveys, and census data document the "brain drain," the phenomenon of highly educated and highly skilled workers migrating from their hometown to an urban or metropolitan area that promises a better life. Early indications of brain drain begin with high school graduates determining where to attend college.…

On the whole, futurists usually suffer badly. Unforeseen challenges, new political realities, technological breakthroughs, and cultural patterns shape futures as well as markets. As one realist once said, "real life happens in-between plans." I suspect the future reality lies somewhere in between these two possible pathways. The larger…

The author has 25 years of experience in higher education leadership, overseeing two campuses and two university systems. He has maintained a strong connection to the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities (CUMU), both philosophically and in practical terms. In this article, the author discusses his experience and feelings on social…

The concept of the anchor institution, and its subsequent mission, was first considered in the mid-1990s, a time during which the dominant academic culture of higher education was driven by the "public good regime." The decades since have seen the emergence of the public engagement knowledge regime, and the academic capitalist regime.…

Modern urban and metropolitan universities are increasingly obliged to recognize their role as anchor institutions. These same institutions of higher education (IHEs) also have a responsibility to educate students to be responsible and participatory citizens in society. An increasing number of IHEs recognize these distinct commitments as central…

As campuses seek to advance community engagement, and embrace their role as anchor institutions within their community, questions emerge regarding how this role connects to and informs priorities within larger institutional mission and goals. Welch & Saltmarsh (2013) have noted that, historically, infrastructure--a center or office that…

California State University, Los Angeles (Cal State LA) has committed to becoming Los Angeles' premier educational anchor institution, forging meaningful partnerships that contribute to the overall well-being of the region. Cal State LA ranks number one in the nation for the upward mobility of its students (Chetty, Friedman, Saez, Turner, &…

Drawing on cultural studies and the practice of engaged learning and scholarship, this paper proposes a cultural approach to institutional transformation, which we argue necessarily follows anchor partnerships. The authors advance a model of cohesion and alignment among equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), community engagement, and social…